"The castle is enchanting; the view pleased me more than I can express, the river Avon tumbles down a cascade at the foot of it. It is well laid out by one Brown who has set up on a few ideas of Kent...." Walpole, 1751..
"His (Brown's) style of smooth undulating grass, which would run straight to the house, clumps, belts and scattering of trees and his serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers, were a new style within the English landscape, a "gardenless" form of landscape gardening, which swept away almost all the remnants of previous formally patterned styles." Wikipedia Oh my, thought I was copying Sir Edwin Lutyens at Great Dixter, ca. 1900, with this idea !
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"judicious manipulation of its components, adding a tree here or a concealed head of water there. His art attended to the formal potential of ground, water, trees and so gave to English landscape its ideal forms. The difficulty was that less capable imitators and less sophisticated spectators did not see nature perfected... they saw simply what they took to be nature". Richard Bisgrove H.F. du Pont designed his beloved woodland at Winterthur in this manner. You must walk the grounds of Winterthur if you haven't already.
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"Russell Page, who began his career in the Brownian landscape of Longleat but whose own designs have formal structure, accused Brown of "encouraging his wealthy clients to tear out their splendid formal gardens and replace them with his facile compositions of grass, tree clumps and rather shapeless pools and lakes".[4] Richard Owen Cambridge, the English poet and satirical author, declared that he hoped to die before Brown so that he could "see heaven before it was 'improved'". Wikipedia Russell Page wrote, The Education of a Gardener, order it NOW. Ironically I see Capability Brown's work within Page's work.
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Maximizing simplicities maximizes the capabilities in your landscape.
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Garden & Be Well, XO Tara
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Pic taken from Kew Gardens in England. Thank you Wikipedia for the delights about Capability Brown. More about Brown, here.
Funny there are 2 Capability posts today: "At Croome, Brown designed both the house and the park, although his work was supplemented in the house by Robert Adam,..."
ReplyDeletehttp://englishbuildings.blogspot.com/2010/12/croome-worcestershire.html
Tis a gift to be simple.
ReplyDeleteI think of Capability Brown's work and mindset as less perfecting nature, and more as "adapting nature's perfection" to our manmade constructs.
ReplyDeleteUnless Puppet Barbuda thinks I have too little oxygen up here in the high desert!